In the consumer electronics and computer industries, transmission of audio signals from a host to remote device speakers has generally been accomplished over an analog wired interface comprising speaker wire. With the advent of digital audio content, the desire to maintain the pristine digital audio signal as far as possible along the audio signal chain has motivated designers to pursue digital interfaces to replace unsightly, signal-loss-prone analog speaker wires.
The High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is an all-digital audio/video interface capable of transmitting data streams. HDMI is compatible with High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) Digital Rights Management technology. HDMI provides an interface between any compatible digital audio/video source, such as a set-top box, a DVD player, an optical disc player, a PC, a video game console, or an audio video (AV) receiver and a compatible digital audio and/or video monitor, such as a digital television (DTV).
FIG. 1 shows an example of a conventional prior art audio video system that includes a source, HDMI AV receiver, with a centralized amplifier connected via an HDMI cable to HDMI DVD player and also connected via an HDMI cable to a display (HDMI TV). The HDMI AV receiver is also connected via analog speaker wires to a set of 6 speakers, each connected point-to-point from the HDMI AV receiver. Speakers in FIG. 1 are identified as follows: Front Left (FL), Front Right (FR), Center (C), Surround Left (SL), Surround Right (SR), and Low Frequency Effect (LFE), also commonly referred to as a “subwoofer.”
FIG. 1 contains components which can maintain pristine digital audio and video from source to display through HDMI interconnects. The interconnects from the source to the speakers still comprise analog signals via conventional speaker wires. For prior art systems containing 6 individual speakers (e.g., 5.1 surround sound), and other, more advanced systems that support up to 8 speakers (e.g., 7.1 surround sound) or more, the speaker wire interconnections not only suffer from analog signal loss, but the speaker wire interconnections can be an eyesore or be a wire-hiding challenge.
Wireless prior art systems use a hub-spoke approach that is unreliable and susceptible to frequent audio dropouts caused by audio signals being lost between transmitter and the speakers.